New Naira Notes: EFCC Says Several Bureau De Change In Nigeria Are Unregistered

The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) has disclosed that several of the over 6,000 Bureau De Change (BDC) operators in the country are unregistered.

Naija News reports that the anti-graft agency said it uncovered the development when its operatives raided some BDC offices in Abuja and Lagos to sanitise the foreign exchange sector.

According to the commission, its men acted on intelligence on some operators of BDC, noting that the arrest of such unregistered BDC operators and currency speculators in the parallel market was not indiscriminate but a product of intelligence.

It will be recalled that the move to sanitise the foreign exchange sector follows the Central Bank of Nigeria’s (CBN) announcement last month to redesign the N200, N500 and N1000 naira notes as a measure to control inflation as well as revive the economy.

The EFCC’s Director of Operations, Abdulkarim Chukkol, however, said during the Good Morning Nigeria, a breakfast programme on the Network Service of the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA), that the agency “considers foreign exchange malpractice as an economic crime against the Nigerian State.”

Naija News gathered that EFCC, in a statement issued by its Head of Media and Publicity, Wilson Uwujaren, said Chukkol, who represented the agency’s Executive Chairman Abdulrasheed Bawa to discuss “Sanitising Ungoverned Operators in the Forex Sector” on the NTA programme noted that CBN guidelines are clear regarding returns by BDC operators but most of them don’t go by those guidelines.

The statement explained that “Many of the over 6,000 registered BDC do not belong to the Association of Bureau De Change Operators of Nigeria and therefore out of the orbit of regulators.

“The CBN guidelines are clear regarding returns by BDCs, but how many of them do this?

“The commission as far back as 2016 established a full-fledge Section known as Foreign Exchange Malpractices Section and for over 10 years maintained visible “presence at all airports in the country to checkmate incidences of bulk cash movement outside Nigeria which is another aspect of this menace.

“Through the Commission’s presence at the major gateway into the country, many arrests of cash smugglers have been made and humungous sums in foreign currencies recovered.

“Some were arrested with an excess of $ 6 million (USD), others with $ 2 million (USD) and we know that these huge sums were not meant to be used in buying goods but stolen monies being laundered out of the country.

“The EFCC not only recovered some of these monies but secured their forfeiture to the Federal Government. The culprits were prosecuted.”